Sigrid Horn & Ernst Molden

In old Vienna, specifically in the early seventies, a tall man consistently roamed the city in sandals. He had messy hair but orderly thoughts. His name was Rolf Schwendter. He belonged to the rare species of Germans who entered the annals as "Austrian writers." When he was interviewed by television, the wonderful insert "deviance researcher" reliably appeared beneath his striking likeness. Not least, he was fascinated by the local deviations of language. Why does the local dialect not have a singular form for "egg"? "Ara wachs Eier" is the correct order for a soft-boiled egg in establishments like Café Drechsler. However, in the plural, the Viennese dialect insists on the incorrect singular. "Ara Eierspeis mit drei Ei!" a guest might order at the Kleines Café at Franziskanerplatz. All the contemporary songwriters of the Austrian scene are deviance researchers. Many of them also sing in dialect. Sigrid Horn, for instance, is rooted in the dialect of the Mostviertel region. With a bright, powerful voice, she embarked on small escapes and critical reflections in her song collection "Nest." In the end, she found herself, surrounded by strings, in the heart of silence. A paradox of her art lies in being both socially critical and escapist at the same time. In her musings, something healing sparkles. The dialect is her original form of expression, one that offers more possibilities with vowels and consonants when singing than standard German," she says. The Mostviertel dialect provides a different placement of the voice and distinctive vowel colors. Concrete and imaginary landscapes intertwine in an inseparable way in her songs. She never falls for the temptations of the idyll, despite the fragrant "Öpfebam" and picturesque "Mostbianblia."

Ernst Molden, who claims to be one to two generations older than Horn, has a completely different relationship with the wild dialect. After early, gently anarchic years as an "artist without a work," he emerged in the nineties with plays like "Der Basilisk" and novels like "Die Krokodilsdame." Between 2003 and 2006, he recorded three albums with high-language lyrics. He located the dialect within "Austropop," a genre that no reasonable artist wanted to belong to at the time. The turning point came with the album "Foan," on which he transposed international highlights like Will Oldham's "I See A Darkness" and Nick Cave's "Weeping Song" into Viennese. On the twin album "Wien," which was full of original compositions, a first dialect song made it onto the tracklist. That song was "Hammerschmidgossn," a collaboration with the highly esteemed Willi Resetarits, who also credibly mastered both high-language songs and those "from the backwoods." For Molden, the dialect is a beloved and lived artistic language. He received his knighthood in this idiom in 2018 when he was allowed to translate an Asterix comic into Viennese.